HoUinger Corp. 
pH8.5 



ADDEESS 



DELIVERED AT 



HAVERFORD COLLEGE, 



BEFORE THE 



ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, 



AT THEIR ANNUAL MEETING, OCTOBER 24, 1868, 



BY 

LLOYD P. SMITH 



LIBKAEIAN OF THE PHT'OADELPHIA LIBRARY. 







■< 



♦♦nt»^*^' 



■^i 



Yet I doubt not through the ages one unceasing purpose runs; 
And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns. 

TEiNNYSON. 



PHILADELPHIA: 
J. B. LIPPINGOTT & CO 

18 69. 



■hi' 



ADDEESS. 



PB0FS3SCES OF BLkVEKFORD COLLEGE, FeLLOW GbADUATES, 

AXD Fkiexds: 

It is now just thirtj-one years since the Class of which it was 
my lot to be a member was graduated from yonder now time- 
honored walls. 

The first thought which arises in the minds of all of os — old 
Haverford scholars — when we revisit these academic shades, has 
reference to the changes wrought by Time since we were students 
here. It would be natural that I should speak to yon of the 
changes in the Institution itself, in my contemporaries here, in our 
beloved country, in the world. But these themes have been so 
often and so well treated by those who have preceded me at these 
yearly gatherings of the Alumni, that I shall not touch upon 
them, but shall ask your attention for a brief period to changes 
of another kind, and such as are, perhaps, not unsuitable for 
discussion by those whose privilege it is to have enjoyed a liberal 
education. I speak of the remarkable advance in human know- 
ledge which has taken place since we bade adieu to Alma Mater. 
Time would not permit (even if I had the ability) to take up 
the various sciences in order and to recall the progress which 
has been made in each since 1837. The points rather to which I 
shall invite your attention are the general tendency of modern 
science, and the analogy which exists between the history of the 
universe as thereby disclosed, and that of literature — the one 
being the expression of the thought of the Creator, and the other 
that of His creature. Man. If it shall appear that there is any 
resemblance between the two. it will but add one more to the 
analogies and the harmonies which pervade Creation. 

If we take a cursorv olance at those branches of knowledcre 



4 

wliicli have to do witli the material universe, we shall find that 
the grand discoveries made in our time all tend in one direc- 
tion, viz, : to prove that the laws which govern the Creation are 
the laws of Continuity, Development and Progress. 

Take Astronomy, for example. By the use of that wonderful 
method, the spectrum analysis, the light coming from the sun and 
the stars has been made to reveal the elements of which those 
bodies are composed ; so that it is no exaggeration to say that the 
past ten years have taught us more of the physical constitution 
of the universe than was found out in all previous ages put 
together. We now know not only that the sun is an intensely 
heated solid or liquid body enveloped in the flames of burning 
gases, but that iron, calcium (the base of lime), magnesium, 
sodium, chromium, and other elements of our earth, are present 
in the solar atmosphere. The fixed stars, by the use of the spectro- 
scope, exhibit bright and dark lines across the spectrum, many 
of which are the same as those brought out by the simple sub- 
stances which make up this planet; those lines indicate the presence, 
among other elements, of hydrogen (one of the constituents of 
water), sodium (the base of common salt), magnesium and iron. 
But the farther we penetrate into space, the more unlike to those 
we are acquainted with become the objects of our examination. 
When we proceed to the appearances of the more distant nebulae, 
we get but one or two known lines, and we are met by one or 
two new bands not yet identified with any produced by substances 
on this globe. Moreover, it is made certain that the brightest 
at least of the so-called fixed stars are, like our sun, burning 
bodies, surrounded with gaseous flames ; so that whatever life 
exists in the universe is probably confined to their satellites and 
to the planets of our own system. Finally, recent astronomical 
discoveries have proved that some at least of what are called 
fixed stars have an independent motion of their own. Sirius, for 
example, the brighest of them, travels at the rate of a thousand 
million miles a year. The constellations scattered apparently at 
random over the vault of heaven will probably be forced sooner 
or later to give up their secrets, and the time may come when we 
shall discover the laws of organization which bind them into a 
system. 



Look, how the floor of heaven ' 
Is thick inh^id with patines of bright gold ; 
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim ; 
Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
But, while this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 

We cannot indeed hear the music of the spheres with our bodily 
ears, but in these most interesting discoveries our minds discern 
the divine laws of harmonious, continuous life, obtaining on the 
most august scale possible to our comprehension. It is perhaps 
too soon to assert that the changes now going on among the stars 
mean progress, but the analogy of nature makes it probable that 
development characterizes the entire universe. Meantime, the 
mere discovery of hydrogen in the fixed stars — nitrogen being 
present in the nebulae — proves the substantial unity and conti- 
nuity of Creation. 

This continuous unity in variety is even more strikingly ex- 
hibited in our solar system. The clouds, snows, continents and 
seas of Mars make it almost certain that that planet is inhabited, 
though the conditions of life are slightly modified as compared 
wnth those on our earth. As we proceed in imagination toward 
the more remote planets of our system, those conditions are 
gradually changed ; and corresponding modifications in the living 
beings who may inhabit our fellow-satellites must be taken for 
granted. Among the innumerable combinations of matter and 
incarnations of force which are going on within the bounds of the 
universe, we know those only which are confined to our little globe, 
but it may be that there are forms of existence as far transcending 
humanity as humanity itself transcends the sea-weed. However 
this may be, modern science proves that our sun audits attendant 
planets form one system, the subordinate parts of which are in 
vital connection with one another and with their progenitor, the 
Sun. The nebular hypothesis of Laplace which has recently 
received some valuable corrections and modifications from Pian- 
cini, finds more and more acceptance with men of science; and it is 
universally felt that this theory, or some other analogous to it, must 
be received as explaining the past history of our solar system. 



6 

Indeed, an analysis of the light from the nebulas has pretty nearly 
demonstrated the truth of Laplace's and Herschel's theory, and 
has made it almost certain that the condensation of gaseous 
matter into suns with their attendant planets is even now going 
on in the regions of space. Here again we have a magnificent 
example of the known universal law of continuity, and of the 
probably universal law of progress from the simple to the complex. 

Narrowing our gaze to the little ball on which we live, we find 
that, following the lead of Sir Charles Lyell, nearly all whose 
studies warrant them in expressing an opinion on the subject 
are agreed in holding that the present state of our globe, as far as 
we can penetrate its surface, is to be accounted for by the action 
of the same forces which we see at work to day; forces which 
have been operating gradually and continuously — without haste, 
but without rest — in the past. According to this theory, geological 
revolutions are the regular and necessary effects of great and 
general causes, rather than the result of a series of convulsions 
and catastrophes, regulated by no laws and reducible to no fixed 
principles — the changes of climate on the earth's surface, for 
example, as evidenced by geological phenomena, being founded 
on the changes of eccentricity in the earth's orbit. Here we find 
that the law of continuity and gradual change is sufficient to 
account for all the appearances presented by inorganic nature. 

But this is not all. Geologists with one voice bear witness to 
the continued development and progress of organic life on the 
surface of our planet, from the earliest period to the present day. 
Various theories have been proposed, from that of Lamarck of 
the action of circumstances to that of Darwin of the survival of 
the fittest, to account for this continuous advance. None of these 
theories, however true, seems sufficient to explain all the facts. But 
the reality of Progress is unquestionable, and, under whatever 
law it has proceeded, we may be well assured that it has not taken 
place by chance, but by the unceasing action of a superintending 
Providence. He in whom we ourselves live and move and have 
our being has directed the movement in conformity with His own 
wise plans, and toward a definite end of which we are now per- 
mitted to have some glimpses. 

We see that during the inconceivable ages of the past all things 



have tended to prepare the way for the coming ot Man. To my 
thinking, the discoveries of the last thirty years are in no respect 
more startling than in the light which they shed upon the primeval 
history of our race. I well recollect the impression produced 
on my mind in 1849 by the perusal of Boucher de Perthes' 
Antiquiies Oeltkines et Antediluviennes, then just published ; and 
I have lived to see the incredulity with which that work was 
received by the learned give place to a unanimous acceptance of 
the amazing facts which he was the first to give to the world. 
To-day it is established that the original inhabitants of Europe 
were cannibals, waging a precarious warfare with the cave-lion, 
the cave-bear, the hyena, and the rhinoceros. Possessed of stone 
weapons only, and destitute of flocks and herds, they were 
savages, probably not unlike the most barbarous tribes of our 
North American Indians. The discovery, recently described by 
Professor Whitney, of a fossil skull in California at the depth of 
one hundred and thirty feet, in a bed which was deposited when 
the volcanoes of the Sierra Nevada were still in vigorous action, 
previous to the glacial epoch of those mountains and before the 
period of the mastodon and elephant, seems to show that the 
antiquity of man is as great in the New World as in the Old. It 
is evident that the infancy of our race, which in some parts of 
the globe is not yet finished, was prolonged through an immense 
period of time. The apparition of man was far anterior to the 
historic age ; he was present at climatic and geological revolutions 
which preceded the present condition of our globe. Among the 
few human skulls found in the oldest deposits, some have been 
recovered which are almost bestial in their shape — less developed 
indeed than those of the present natives of Australia. 

These discoveries have raised a curious question. Were those 
rude savages whose chipped flint instruments have been dug 
up in various parts of Europe the ancestors of the present 
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians? Where was 
then the civilized and civilizing Caucasian ? The use of metals, 
an early step in civilization, was evidently unknown to the men 
of the drift period, and the knowledge of bronze and iron as 
evidently at length came from the East, whose people, long 
after the disappearance of the now extinct mammalia, advancing 



toward tlie West, gradually drove its savages into the corners 
of Europe. As regards the Mongols and the Negroes, there is 
nothing to indicate that the lands they now inhabit were 
. ever tenanted by other peoples : but as regards the Aryans or 
true white men, there is abundant evidence that they were 
originally one clan or family in the south of Asia ; that they 
emigrated thence ; that they encountered and subdued tribes 
of a darker skin in the lands to which they wandered ; and 
further, that while they have ever since been spreading, their 
civilization has been constantly increasing. What ground is 
there for supposing that while one branch of this family went the 
ways we know they did and became at last what they are, 
another branch poured into Central Asia and became men of the 
Mongolian type, while a third went into Africa and became 
Negroes ? In other words, what is there to show that while one 
branch of the Aryan race became the subject of never-ceasing 
improvement, another has suffered never-ceasing degradation ? 
Such a theory is absolutely without foundation. No tradition 
even remains of an antique people from whose degeneracy result- 
ed the yellow and black skinned races of men; the evidence of 
science is that the earth was already overspread with the inferior 
races when the Aryan appeared. The "dark complexion, flat 
nose and small eyes" attributed some forty centuries ago in the 
oldest hymns of the Eig-Veda to the godless Dasyas, are still visi- 
ble in their descendants, the naked savages known as the Santhals, 
who linger in the woods and mountains of Bengal. Moreover, 
and this is important, the tendency of the Caucasian family (in 
which I include the Semitic race) is to conquer and extinguish — to 
supplant the other families of man, as in the case of our North 
American Indians. This tendency has always shown itself in 
history, until to-day it may be said that the white man rules the 
world ; mind ever tending to subdue matter. Here again we have 
in the various gradations in human races — from those which are 
but little above the brute up to those which are but little below the 
angel, and which tend to survive the others — another instance of 
that progress which seems to characterize the universe. 

Eestricting our gaze once more to the great Aryan family, 
that white race to which it is our privilege to belong — 



9 

a privilege bringing witli it its peculiar duties, the due per- 
formance of which we shall have to answer for — we shall find, I 
think, that the same law obtains. Of the character, religion and 
manners of the Aryan race in its original seat at the foot of the 
Hindoo-Koosh Mountains, but little until recently was known. The 
researches of Sanskrit scholars, however, have brought to light 
certain facts which prove the Aryans to have been from the first 
a noble breed of men, possessed of a brain of enormous capacity 
as compared with that of the tribes around them. It was they 
who tamed the animals of the forest, who cultivated wild 
plants into the varieties useful to man, discovered the means of 
extracting metals from their ores, and invented machinery. As 
the geologist is justified in inferring the cannibalism of the men of 
the drift period from the discovery of human bones split to extract 
the marrow, so the philologist, who finds that the word, which in 
Sanskrit corresponds to our word daughter, Ovydttjp, means milker 
or milkmaid, and that father in Sanskrit is synonymous with 
pastor, is justified in inferring that at the time when some of their 
commonest and most necessary words were coined the Aryan 
race owned herds of cattle and used them for domestic purposes — 
a manifest commencement of civilization. Their religion was 
the worship of the sun and the storm, the natural religion of 
observing minds destitute of the light of revelation ; and out of 
this primitive faith have grown all the uninspired theologies of 
civilized man. Back, however, of their worship of the radiant 
orbs of heaven, of the sacred aether, the central thought of the 
Aryan family of man is the belief that Grod is in the world and 
the world in God. The idolatry into which the race in the lapse of 
time and through intercourse with inferior types fell, is a perversion 
and a degradation. For while man himself progresses, the natural 
tendency of all religions is to decline from spirituality to formal- 
ism ; like rivers flowing from a clear spring, they lose in purity 
what they gain in volume. This was eminently the case with the 
religion of the Yedas, It needed the purifying influence of a 
monotheistic race, and the revelations made from time to time to 
prophets, martyrs and reformers — above all, the teachings of our 
Lord — before it issued in the wholesome, life-giving stream of 
Christianity. 



10 

Conquering its way, at a very early period, a branch of the 
splendid race of men whose career I strive to trace, occupied 
Egypt, their conquest of the dark-skinned natives being noted in 
the Egyptian annals as the commencement of the dynasties of the 
gods. Here their genius developed itself in the direction of 
religion, architecture, and various arts and sciences, including the 
invention of hieroglyphical writing. In Phoenicia, it took the 
coarse of commerce, navigation and the invention of alphabetical 
writing. In adopting Gobineau's theory that the Semites and 
Copts were the first offshoots of the Aryan stock, I am aware that 
it is an hypothesis only; the argument for progress would be unaf- 
fected by assigning to the ruling caste of Egypt, to the Hebrews, the 
Phoenicians, the Berbers and the Arabs, a separate origin as the 
flower of the dark-skinned autochthons of the Levant. To the 
Jews, who were, possibly, a branch of the same Aryan race (the 
Egyptian tongue being a link between the Indo-Germanic and 
Semitic languages) — to the Hebrews were committed the oracles of 
God. To them was revealed the unity of God — "Hear ! Israel, 
Jehovah thy God, Jehovah One" — to a full apprehension of which 
truth, however, they attained only by degrees. It was still a long 
time before they, and through them the other races of men, were 
vouchsafed the revelation of "Him in whom was life; and the 
life was the light of men." For "the law was given by Moses, but 
grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" — whose name be blessed 
for evermore ! Thus even in theology there is a progressive as well 
as a permanent element, and the anthropomorphism of Moses 
must be interpreted by the spirituality of David and the univer- 
sality of Paul. 

Another branch of the same white or Aryan race settled in 
Greece; and there was the commencement of literature and 
the fine arts properly so called. Bunsen calls the Greeks "that 
nation of Aryan antiquity which was the most humane, the most 
instinct with the divine element, and which has exercised the most 
powerful agency in moulding the actual world." In their twin 
prophets. Homer and Hesiod, and especially the latter, we find, 
I'or perhaps the first time, the grand idea of Progress, the belief 
in a beneficent Power which disposes of the affairs of men. 

In Eome originated Civil and Municipal Law, wonderful pro- 



11 

ducts of the human mind, to which we are mainly indebted for 
our own system of jurisprudence. 

Still pushing westward, along the coast of the Mediterranean, 
the Atlantic Ocean formed a barrier which, in the Middle Ages, 
could not be passed. Hence that returning wave to the Levant 
which we call the Crusades. Up to this time civilization may be 
said to have been limited to the basin of the Mediterranean Sea, 
around whose borders it coursed for three thousand years. At 
last the fulness of time arrived, and from the western extremity 
of the Mediterranean proceeded the expedition of Columbus, des- 
tined to discover this New World. Then followed the rise of 
England as a great and colonizing nation, endowed with daring 
and persistent energy; and the seat of civilization was transferred 
from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, around whose 
shores are situated the Great Powers which to-day march in the 
van of progress. The time will come, in the westward course of 
empire, when the Pacific Ocean will play the part now allotted to 
the Atlantic ; its borders will be the seat of that civilization of the 
future of which all other civilizations have been but the forerun- 
ners. In the world that is to be, America will occupy the position 
held in the ancient world by Italy, having on each side oceans, 
but oceans as much larger than the Mediterranean Sea as the des- 
tiny of America is grander than was that of Rome. 

The striking fact in all this wonderful career is, that while in 
the various ways in which the genius of the bearded man developed 
itself, there was that continuity which consisted in the possession 
of a language essentially the same, common traditions, the know- 
ledge of agriculture, and the use of the metals — in a word, that 
while the Caucasian race, whether in Babylon, Egypt, Phoenicia. 
Greece, Rome, England, or the United States, possessed a civiliza- 
tion radically the same — there was also progress from the simple 
to the complex. That progress is shown in the acquisition of as- 
tronomical knowledge in Egypt, the invention of letters in Phoe- 
nicia, the creation of a literature in Greece, the development of 
the science of government in Rome, the establishment of Habeas 
Corpus and the trial by jury in England (the securities of indi- 
vidual freedom), and finally in that inventive, mechanical genius, 
and that capacity for voluntary organization which constitute the 



12 

distinguishing features of the American mind. What new devel- 
opment is in store must be looked for on the Pacific slope, and 
possibly in Australia, it being as true now as it was when the first 
Aryans took up their march, that only the most energetic and 
vigorous have enterprise enough to leave their homes. 

It would be interesting to examine, in turn, each of these out- 
growths of civilization, and mark its separate development; but 
time will not permit, and on this occasion I shall confine myself to 
one. Let us then now take up the question originally proposed. 
Does the same law of continuity and progress which we have seen 
to hold good in astronomy, in geology, in vegetable and animal 
life, in the history of man in general, and of the white race in par- 
ticular — does this same law obtain in the history of literature? 

Before examining this question, however, let us glance for a 
single moment at the history and development of Language, the 
body of which Literature is the soul. In the science of language, 
the researches of our time are laying bare the most suggestive and 
unlooked-for facts: no less than that all known languages may be 
stratified in the order of their development, from the monosyllabic 
or rudimentary, of which the Chinese is a surviving monument, 
through the agglutinative or Turanian, of which the Mongolian 
tongues are specimens, up to the inflected or those having affixes 
and sufl&xes, of which all the Indo-European dialects, including our 
own, are examples. By the study of the Sanskrit, every step in this 
development may be traced, and the progress of linguistic re- 
search makes it now not improbable that when they were in their 
monosyllabic stage, the "Semitic tongues — that is, the Hebrew, 
Arabic, etc. — were identical with the primitive form of the Indo- 
European languages themselves. In a word, it results from the 
researches of Bopp and the modern school, that language tends 
to undergo, and in the case of the Indo-Germanic languages, that 
it has undergone, a regular and natural development, every step 
of which may be traced. It is much the same with the numerals. 
We can follow them to their source, and prove that the Arabic ' 
figures 1, 2, 3, &c., the corresponding Eoman numerals I, II, 
III, &c., and those of all other nations, have been invented by the 
wit of man. 



13 

So much for tlie sliell, the envelope ; let us now return to the 
substance of Literature, which in its largest sense means the written 
expression of the thoughts of man. There are other expressions 
of human thought, such as Architecture, Painting, Music and 
Sculpture, all of which are subjected to the law of continuity, de- 
velopment and progress, though in the case of sculpture there has 
been little or no progress since the age of Pericles. But this by 
the way. Let us return to Literature. All the books that ever 
were written (except catalogues and other bibliographical works) 
may be divided into five classes: Theology, Jurisprudence, 
Sciences and Arts, Belles-Lettres and History. But on the present 
occasion I shall pass by Theology, Jurisprudence, Sciences and 
Arts, and History, and speak of Literature proper or Belles-Let- 
tres, of which Poetry is the highest type. The question is. Does 
the history of pure Literature or Belles-Lettres show continuity, 
progress and development ? 

There are not wanting those who deny this; admitting the con- 
tinuity, they deny the progress. They tell you that the difference 
between the literature of ancient Greece, for example, and that of 
modern nations, is that the one is original and the other merely 
imitative. It cannot be denied that there is a grain of truth in 
this assertion, but in the sweeping and unqualified way in which 
it is made by Muir and other writers on Greek literature, it is 
entirely false. 

In the first place, it must not be supposed that the earliest 
Greek writers whose works have come down to us were the first 
in the field. Nature does nothing by great leaps. There were 
brave men before Agamemnon, and before Homer there were 
other Greek poets ; a catalogue of their names and their works has 
come down to us. The poems of both Homer and Hesiod rest on 
an older groundwork; and there was more than one national litera- 
ture before that of Greece. Solomon's Song is perfect in its way, 
and the papyri found in Egyptian tombs contain novels as well as 
fragments of the Book of the Dead. iEschylus confesses his obli- 
gation to a Libyan legend in the famous passage: — 

An eagle once — so Libyan legends say — 
Struck to the heart, on earth expiring lay. 
And gazing on the shaft that winged the blow. 
Thus spake: "Whilst others' ills from others flow, 
To my own plumes, alas ! my fate I owe." 



14 

This fable, bj the way, has been borrowed by La Fontaine; and 
Waller, and after him Byron, have repeated it without acknow- 
ledgment. If we knew all, the claims of the Greeks themselves 
to perfect originality might be seriously impaired. Still, so far , 
as the Greeks were the first to describe the phenomena of external 
nature, the actions and passions of men, they were, to a great 
extent, original. The Greek poets appear to have written down 
whatever struck them as just and impressive, without fear of being 
accused of stealing from a predecessor ; and if we speak of the 
same things, we must needs in some sort, follow them, that is, if 
we describe truly. It is the same with criticism, of which Aris- 
totle's Art of Poetry is the best-esteemed piece among the ancients. 
How .came he to excel Horace, and Boileau, and Pope, who were 
better poets, and who had also the advantage of studying him 
before they wrote ? Because they only copied him, but he had 
copied nature. 

Homer, telling of the march of an army, says: " The firm earth 
groaned beneath the steeds and armed men." Napier, in his 
Peninsular War — doubtless unconsciously — says the same thing 
in almost the same words; it is the natural thing to say. Still 
the poet who follows Homer, and who must often describe the 
same things as Homer describes, may place an idea in a clearer 
light and present it in a neater form of expression than his pre- 
decessors ; and this has often been done. For example, Homer 
says : 

Aurora now was rising up the steep 
Of high Olympus, to the immortal gods 
Pure' light diffusing. 

This is a simple personification of the dawn. Compare with it 

Shakespeare's more exquisite description of a sunrise: • 

Look ! love, what envious streaks 
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east ; 
Night's candles are burnt out; and jocund Day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top. 

I may remark in passing that this charming picture of the gen- 
tle and gradual dawning of natural light is a true illustration of 
the historical development of the light of knowledge. 

What more natural dissuasive from suicide to be addressed to a 
martial people than that quoted by Cicero from a Greek writer?— 



15 

Yetatque Pythagoras, injussu im/peratoris, id est Dei, de prsesidio 
et statione vitse discedere. That is to say, "Pythagoras forbids us 
to quit our post or station of life without the orders of the com- 
mander (that is God) who gave it us." But Spenser, in the Faery 
Queen, has placed the same thought in a more striking light: — 

For he who doth appoint the sentinel his roome 
Will license him depart at sound of morning droome. 

Here the words "sentinel" and "at sound of morning drum" 
bring before the mind the picture of the guard wearily pacing his 
round and longing for the relief which will certainly come with 
the dawn. 

I do not wisb to detract from the exquisite beauty of many 
of Homer's comparisons and generally of his descriptions of ex- 
ternal things — in these he has seldom been surpassed save by 
Dante and Shakespeare — but in his delineation of the emotions of 
the soul, Homer is inferior to hundreds of poets who have suc- 
ceeded him. Grand as are the ring and majesty of rhythm in the 
7^ia(/,and noble as are the largeness and naturalnessof expression- 
things that are characteristic of a growmg people, it must be con- 
fessed — ^with all deference to the English critics with whom, for 
one hundred and fifty years, it has been the fashion to extol 
Homer as the greatest poet the world has ever produced, it must 
be confessed that there is a certain barbarism which reflects the 
times in which the poems attributed to Homer were collected. 
The poetry is mainly the poetry of martial life : it sings of clash- 
ing shields, of wounds and gore — of the artificial gods of a gifted 
but baby nation. You look in vain in the Iliad and the Odyssey 
for any of that apprehension of the puzzling problems of life 
which, five hundred years later, characterized to some extent the 
tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and which lends such 
solemn interest to the book of Job — for any expression of the 
inner thought of the age, such as in our time breathes through 
the verses of Tennyson. Accordingly the advice of Sir William 
Temple must be taken with some grains of allowance. He says : 

Read Homer once and you can read no more ; 
For all books else appear so mean, so poor, 
Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, 
And Homer will be all the books you need. 



16 

For my part, I want a few more, such as the Bible, Dante, 
Shakespeare, and Pilgrim's Progress, to saj nothing of the Satur- 
day Review and Lippincott'' s Magazine. 

The fact is, there was no reach of thought nor fineness of sensibil- 
ity among the early Greeks, because reflection had not yet wakened 
the deeper sympathies of their nature ; and we are perpetually 
shocked with the imperfections of their morality and the coarse- 
ness of their affections, because society had not yet subsisted 
long enough in peace and security to develop those finer sources 
of emotion. The extreme grossness and ribaldry of Aristophanes 
are apt to excite our wonder when we first consider him as the 
contemporary of Euripides, Socrates, and Plato ; but the truth 
is, that the Athenians, after all, were but a rude populace as to 
moral delicacy and social refinement. 

And even in their philosophy, which it is the correct thing to 
praise, one must search through bushels of chaff' to get one grain 
of wheat. Plato has some beautiful and a few sublime thoughts, 
but he abounds in trifling disquisitions and foolish notions ; and 
many of his propositions are so absurd that a schoolboy can see 
their worthlessness. Plato tells us, for example, in the Timseus, 
that all things are made out of the four elements — earth, air, fire 
and water, and moreover that three of these elements are composed 
of scalene triangles and the fourth of isosceles triangles. The 
originality of Plato has been exaggerated; and Gladisch has 
recently shown that his mind was but the intellectual stomach in 
which was imperfectly digested the crude mental food coming 
from the Persian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Egyptian and the 
Jewish schools of thougTit. This, however, may be said in favor 
of Greek philosophy, that it carried the a priori method of investi- 
gation as far as it was possible to carry it. Modern metaphysical 
writers merely reproduce the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, 
Plotinus, and the rest. What we have found out, however, is a 
novum organum, a new and fruitful Method — that of induction. 
It was by pursuing the unscientific method of the ancients, and re- 
ferring everything to final causes, that one Greek philosopher 
arrived at the notable conclusion that the shape of the soul is spher- 
ical, because a sphere is the most perfect shape ; and another added 



three planets to the seven wTiicIi had already been discovered, 
because ten is the perfect number. 

The exaggerated praise which has been given to Greek litera- 
ture by English pedants, who naturally exalt that to the study of 
which their lives have been devoted, is out of place in this country, 
where we dare think for ourselves, where a new and productive 
land, free institutions, an energetic race (the flower of the Old 
World), together with grand industrial and political achievements, 
conspire to make Americans believe in Progress — in the present 
and the future rather than in the past. A man is not considered 
educated here whose knowledge consists alone of 

The languages, especially the dead ; 
The sciences, especially the abstruse ; 

The arts — at least all such as can be said 
To be the most i-emote from common use. 

On the other hand, a total neglect of the classics is equally to be 
avoided if American scholarship is to be worth anything. The 
knowledge of Grreek and Latin is the very foundation of all 
culture, and is essential for every one who wishes to use his own 
language with precision ; while the study of the Greek poets is 
the shortest road to enlarged and liberal thought. 

Most true it is that Greek literature laid the foundation ; but 
it is no less certain that Latin, Italian, French, German, and, above 
all, English literature (the noblest of them all), have built upon 
that foundation. The seventeenth century saw the birth of an 
epic as much grander than the Iliad as the loss of Paradise is 
superior in importance to the fall of Troy. 

Of Peleus' son, Achilles, sing, Muse, 
The vengeance deep and deadly ; whence to Greece 
Unnumbered ills arose ; which many a soul 
Of mighty warriors to the viewless shades 
Untimely sent ; they on the battle-plain 
Unburied lay, a prey to ravening dogs 
And carrion birds. 

Such is Homer's subject. Turn now to Milton's : 

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
2 



18 

Restore us, and regaia the blissful seat, 
Sing heavenly muse ! 

What in me is dark 
Illumine, what is low raise and support; 
That to the height of this great argument 
I may assert eternal Providence 
And justify the ways of God to man. 

In the narrow field open to Homer's view, he put forth an 
effort of creative power whicli is perfect of its kind; but it does 
not satisfy the modern mind, accustomed to a wider horizon, aud 
content with nothing less than the epic of the universe. 

Again, Hamlet is a nobler tragedy than Prometheus Bounds 
and the School for Scandal a more exquisite as well as a more 
moral comedy than the Thesmophoriazusse of Aristophanes. In 
the Medea of Euripides, the sorceress is a fury who murders her 
children without apparent provocation ; in those of Legouve and 
Grillparzer this artistic defect is supplied, and the latter contains 
one scene — that in which Creusa teaches Medea a song, and the 
husband refuses to listen — more touching than any in the Greek 
tragedy. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is no 
more to be compared with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire than Aristotle's Historia Ajiimalium is to Cuvier's R^gne 
Animal. 

Having combated what I consider the false idea continually 
thrown out by Oxford and Cambridge scholars, that all modern 
literature is but a mere imitation of that of the Greeks, let us take 
a cursory glance at the subsequent course of that expression of 
human thought which we find in books. 

Latin literature is notoriously an outgrowth from that of Greece^ 
It is a curious fact that, with all their organizing ability, their 
legislative capacity and their genius for arms, the Romans pos- 
sessed nothing but a meagre ballad literature until they imported 
the humanities from Greece. With the exception of so much as 
relates to the art of government the Roman authors from first to 
last were essentially imitative. But their literature was marked 
by a real development. In the first place — and this is very 
remarkable — the Romans, contrary to the custom of all other 
nations, began their career of letters with philosophy. But 
while they borrowed their philosophy from the Greeks, they 



19 

made much more use of it than their masters. The philosophical 
writings of Cicero, for example, though occasionally incumbered 
with the subtleties of his Athenian preceptors, contain a much 
more complete code of morality than is to be found in all the 
volumes of the Grreeks. It is only necessary, however, to compare 
Tully's Offices with Dymond's Principles of Morality to see the 
advance in the science of ethics which time and. Christianity have 
since brought about. 

The usurpation of Augustus gave quite a different character 
to the literary genius of Rome, and brought it back to those 
poetical studies with which most other nations have begun. The 
poetry of the Eomans, however, derived this advantage from the 
lateness of its origin — that it was enriched by all that knowledge 
of the human heart and those habits of reflection which had been 
generated by the previous study of philosophy. 

The atrocious tyranny which darkened the earlier ages of 
the Empire gave rise to the third school of Roman literature. 
Much more profound views of human nature and a far greater 
moral sensibility characterize this age; and show that even the 
unspeakable degradation to which the abuse of power had then 
sunk the mistress of the world could not arrest altogether that 
intellectual progress which gathers its treasures from all the va- 
rieties of human fortune. Seneca, Tacitus, Bpictetus, Quintilian 
and the two Plinys afford evidence of this progress, for they are, 
and especially the three latter, in point of thought, accuracy, 
and profound sense, conspicuously superior to any writers upon 
similar subjects in the days of Augustus. 

Hitherto we have had to do only with Pagan literature. In 
Dante and the Italian school we recognize the influence of 
Christianity, and also the refining effect of that chivalrous respect 
for woman for which Southern Europe was mainly indebted to 
its conquest by the Germanic tribes. Christianity, by infusing 
what had never before been felt — a serious and solemn conviction 
of the immortality of the soul and of a future state of retribution — 
turned men's thoughts away from those earthly glories which had 
called forth the enthusiasm of the Greeks. The respectful and 
romantic feeling toward woman which characterized the so-called 
Northern barbarians, and which they inherited with their pure 



20 

Aryan blood, had two effeicts upon the Italian mind. In the baser 
sort it helped to bring about the worship of the Blessed Virgin, 
while in those in whose blood was more largely infused the healthy 
Germanic element, it gave to the passion of love a tender and 
delicate expression, which, as it shows itself in the poets, 
was unprecedented in literature. In the works of Dante both these 
influences are strikingly manifest; the legitimate dread of future 
punishment which Christianity inspires showing itself in an exag- 
gerated and terrible but still glorious form in the Divina Com- 
tneclia, while the inspiring influences of a pure and romantic love 
disclose themselves in the Vita Nuova. As reo'ards the latter, 
what can be more unlike the coarse pagan love of Homer, or the 
joyful, thoughtless, sensual love of Tibullus and Anacreon, than 
the delicate, tender, mournful, troubled passion of Dante for 
Beatrice? Look at her picture as her poet-lover drew it: 

^ So kind, so full of gentle courtesy 

My lady's greeting is, that every tongue 
To silence thrills, and eyes that on her hung 

With mute observance dare no more to see. 

Onward she moves, clothed with humility — 

Hearing with look benign, her praises rung : 
A being seeming sent from heaven among 

Mankind, to show what heavenly wonders be. 

In all she does such courtly gentleness — 

None can recall her worth without a sigh 

Of love, oppressed with that sweet memory. 

Dante's passion expands his soul into boundless love. "When- 
ever and wherevei'," he says, "Beatrice appeared to me I no longer 
felt that I had an enemy in the world — such a flame of charity 
was kindled in my heart, causing me to forgive every one who 
had offended me." Mazzini has well said, that "in his love for 
the beautiful, in his strivings after inward purity, Beatrice was 
the muse of his understanding, the angel of his soul, the consoling 
spirit which sustained him in exile, poverty and despair." 

Dante is the poet of sorrow and suffering. The acuteness with 
which he felt the ingratitude of his countrymen betrays itself in 
the anecdote of him which the German poet Geibel has repeated 
in verses recently translated by a townswoman of our own : 



21 

Through the streets of fair Verona once alone great Dante went, 
When the bard of Florence wandered from his land in banishment : 
And it chanced a little maiden, as he passed, the poet spied ; 
And she spake thus to her sister who was sitting by her side : 

" Sister, look, there goes that Dante who descended into hell : 
On his dusky brow are written gloom and horror — mark him well ! 
In that city of the torments he has seen such anguish sore 
That an inward terror holds him, and he smileth nevermore." 
Dante heard and turned toward her — from his lips these accents fell : 

" To forget the trick of smiling I need no descent to hell. 
All the suffering I depicted — every torment, every wound — 
Here upon this earth already, ay, in Florence I have found." 

It is in the Divina Commedla that Ave find the touching lines 
which inspired Arj Scheflfer and other artists, and which Ten- 
nyson refers to when he says — 

. . . . This is truth the poet sings. 

That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. 

Xessun raaggior doloi'e 
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
Nella miseria. 

It is only of late years that the genius of Dante, always recoo-- 
nized by the Italians, has been properly appreciated by the Grer- 
mans and the English. It is now dawning upon our minds that 
this sombre, awful and fierce embodiment of the Middle Ages is 
also the greatest of all poets, Shakespeare alone excepted. He 
built upon the foundations laid by Greece and Eome, expressly 
acknowledging his debt to Yirgil ; but the superstructure was the 
work of his own consummate genius, which, like genius at all 
periods, was fully alive to the influences of his age. 

We have not time to do more than refer to the services ren- 
dered to literature by those other great Italians — Petrarch, Boc- 
caccio, Ariosto, and Tasso; and passing over also the French 
poets, who were mostly close imitators of the models of Grreece 
and Eorae, the next great name in pure literature is that of 
Shakespeare, whose works form a striking proof that the law of 
continuity, development and progress includes Letters within its 
scope. Shakespeare followed the literarj- traditions in this — that 
his plays were based upon plots made ready to his hand by the 
romances curi'ent in his day, and especially Bandello's Novels, or 



22 

upon tlie facts of history as he found them in such books as 
Plutarch's Lives and Hollinshed's Chronicles. From the latter 
he copied whole speeches, with a slight improvement of the form 
of expression. He made good use of his "small Latin and less 
Greek," and the original ideas of many of his most beautiful 
passages have been traced to the Latin and Italian poets. But 
he touched nothing that he did not adorn; and if he sometimes 
imitated others he was himself inimitable. It is said, for exam- 
ple, that in Shakespeare's time there was inscribed in large letters 
over the Globe Theatre in London this phrase of Petrouius : 
Quod fere totus munclus exerceat histrionem — Ail the world acts 
the player's part. This was the germ : for ages it had enjoyed, 
as it w^ere, only an inferior and rudimentary life, until its devel- 
opment in the matchless soil of Shakespeare's mind : — 

All the world 's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players. 
They have their exits and their entrances ; 
And one man in his time plays many parts, 
His acts being seven ages ; 

and so on with the celebrated description, familiar to every one 
who hears me. 

Take another example: Yirgil, in curious accordance with 
rabbinical ideas, which Dante and Milton also followed, speaking 
of the infernal regions, says: 

And some are hung to bleach upon the wind, 

Some plunged in waters, others purged in fires, 

Till all the dregs are drained and all the rust expires. 

And see what the idea' becomes when the master artist puts his 
hand to the work : 

Ay ; but to die and go we know not where ; 
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ; 
This sensible, warm motion to become 
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbfed ice ; 
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
And blown with restless violence about 
The pendent world. 

But although Shakespeare served himself all he could by read- 



23 

ing, so that in his own time he was called an upstart crow beau- 
tified Avith the feathers of his neighbors, his works abound with 
original illustrations drawn at first hand from nature ; as when 
he says : 

A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops 
In the bottom of a cowslip. 

His greater conceptions were drawn directly from his own feel- 
ings and observation. He has contributed to our stock of 
household words three times as many phrases as any other au- 
thor; and in a recent collection of familiar quotations one-fourth 
of the volume is occupied by passages from his works. He was 
by no means one of those bankers so common in literature, who 
are rich with the aggregated fortunes of individuals, and who 
would be ruined if they were too heavily drawn on. 

One of the many excellences of the myriad-minded Shake- 
speare's genius was his unrivalled command of language. Unlike 
Johnson, who always used a long word when a short one would 
do as well; or the translators of the Bible, who never used a 
word from the Latin or Greek when they could get hold of as 
good a one from the Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare always used the 
word which best expressed his meaning, long or short. For in- 
stance, his phrase "the multitudinous seas incarnadine" is Latin, 
and the sound answers to the sense, as in the rto%v^'hoi,i(3ovo Qdxasarii 
of Homer; but, he takes care to add in the vernacular — " making 
the green one red." In the address of Suffolk to Queen Margaret 
note how in the following lines almost every word is Saxon until 
we come to the last : 

For where thou art, there is the world itself, 
"With every several pleasure in the world, 
And where thou art not, desolation. 

Eichard Grant White has thrown out the idea that there is no 
good reason why we should not have, at any time when there is 
a favorable conjuncture of circumstances, another poet even 
greater than Shakespeare. And certainly the wonderful advance 
of science in our day, our national progress, and the exaltation 
of mind caused by our late civil war, make the United States of 
our time not unlike the England of Queen Elizabeth and her 
immediate successors; whose age was that of Shakespeare and 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 895 731 



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Bacon and Milton. AVlio knows bat that some subtilo atmos- 
pheric influence was concerned in the successive appearance 
of the clusters of great writers who illustrated the age of Pericles, 
that of Augustus, and that of Elizabeth ? And who can tell when 
the cycle may not come round again? 

Of the last great literary age, next in the roll of deathless 
poets after that of Shakespeare himself, comes the great name of 
Milton ; but I believe that America is yet destined, and perhaps 
ere long, to give to the world an epic as much grander than Mil- 
ton's as our insight into the plans of the Creator is greater than 
was his. The machinery of the Paradise Lost was constructed 
of a lie: its scenery represented the thing that was not — a solid 
heaven, a flat-expanded earth, and" under all a hell peopled with 
intellectual demons, where — 

Higb on a throne of royal state, wliicli far 
Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind, 
• Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand 

Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, 
Satan exalted sat. 

The coming man will tell us of the great soul-satisfying reve- 
lations made by Science of the real history of the universe — he 
will tell of the majestic progress of ideas — and in prophetic 
vision, standing on the shoulders of the generations of the past, 
he will see and point us to the Promised Land. He will sing 
that the Creation is not yel^ finished; that as the ammonite and 
trilobite have given place to' man, so man himself shall be suc- 
ceeded by other forms more beautiful, other souls more elevated, 
other beings more. and yet more like God. 



IliY 27, ICT. 



